Alexandrina

Hello, everybody! This is my first Scribblehub story so I'm still getting to grips with the site and how it works - what I'm intending to do with this story is publish on a regular basis (a chapter every few days) for the first act, which will be about ten chapters or so, and thereafter settle into a rhythm of one chapter a week.

I've also never written anything long-form in first person before, so that's a learning curve!

I've been crying. Mum figures it's just first-day-of-school blues; she assures me that it'll be better tomorrow, that soon enough I'll have made loads of friends, and she gives me an extra chocolate biscuit for my snack. But she doesn't try to find out what's upset me. Even at my young age I can see that she's rushed off her feet. She's had a permanently-frazzled look to her ever since Dad left. As soon as Beth and I have finished our biscuits and our glasses of juice, Mum leaves us. She has to finish her important work before it's time to fix our tea.

As soon as she's gone, Beth gets out of her seat. I'm jealous of her. She's big enough that she can reach the floor, and get into chairs on her own. I can, too, but I have to climb, and when I'm sat on the kitchen chair my feet are swinging barely halfway down the chair legs. I watch as Beth goes over to the fridge, opens it, pulls out the carton of orange juice.

"Bethy, we're not allowed. We'll get in trouble." I hate getting told off. It makes me feel sick inside, so I always do what Mum tells me to do. Beth says that I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but I think she's just teasing me.

She looks at me now, the carton of juice in her hand. "I'm nearly nine now, Harry," she tells me. "I can get my own juice if I want to. And anyway, you're sad, and I want you to be happy."

If by some weird stretch of circumstance you need to go back in time and bribe five-year-old me, here's a tip: orange juice is the currency of choice. All my ills and insecurities are forgotten when I have a glass of that liquid sunlight in front of me. Well, it's less a glass and more a plastic cup with pictures of Scooby-Doo on it, but that's beside the point.

I sip on my juice, and Beth sips on hers, and the two of us sit in silence for a while. From the other room I can hear Mum talking on the phone. She sounds cross. She's always said that we have to be very quiet indeed when she's on the phone, in case it's an Important Person—but I've always been a silent crier anyway. I sniffle, my nose backed up with liquid snot, and Beth reaches out to squeeze my hand. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. Just being there next to me is enough, for now.

I finish my juice and put my cup down on the table. I'm about to start crying again, I can feel it, but before the tears start I turn to her. "Bethy."

"Yes, Harry," she says, smiling down at me.

"Why am I a boy?"

"Because you have a winkie," Beth says. "Me and Mum don't have winkies, so we're girls."

I nod, briefly satisfied. "If I get rid of my winkie, will I be a girl, too?"

Beth looks for a moment as though she's just come down with a nasty case of brain-freeze. She recovers herself, though. "No, Harry. You'll always be a boy."

I start to cry again, a full-force torrent of tears. I'm quaking in my seat as I do, and even my habitual silent crying isn't enough to prevent a few noisy sobs from seeping through. Beth squeezes my hand tightly, and rubs a circle on my back. "Sssh," she says. "Mum's on the phone, Harry."

Between sobs I choke out a few more words. "I don't want to be a boy. I want to be a girl, like you." I break down into indecipherable wails, and Beth hugs me tightly.

*

Oh.

Now there's a memory I repressed...

It's the oddest thing. I can remember holding Mum's hand as she led me down the corridor of my primary school towards the Reception classroom, my brand new uniform scratchy and too big for me—that way I'll grow into it, and she won't have to buy a new one within a month of me starting. I can even, if I really try, remember the moment my teacher made me go and sit with the boys rather than the girls. But other parts of that day are completely gone from my memory. I don't know why I sat with the girls in the first place, or what happened after I'd moved to sit with the boys. I don't remember particularly being unhappy about being a boy—though obviously I must have done, else I wouldn't have been crying about it.

And I don't know why remembering that day is making me cry on the way to school. I mean, it's got nothing to do with anything, has it? When I was too young to understand any better, I once told my sister I wanted to be a girl. Ten years later, she's given me a tube of lipstick, presumably as a way of telling me that for all the teasing she'll have my back if I'm ever genuinely upset. There's no connection. If I actually wanted to be a girl—more than in the way all boys want to be girls, to some extent—then surely I'd have mentioned it at some point between then and now.

But then, I am crying, just a bit. And also wondering what my lips would look like if I put that lipstick on. That's a weird thought. Boys don't wear lipstick—certainly not boys who are currently going out of their way to catch up on the requisite amount of masculinity to fit in with their peers. Jeez. I'm a social washout as it is. Imagine if I rocked up at school with—I check the tube—'Violet Riot' lips.

It would be a bloodbath. Probably in a literal sense, given the size and stated political slants of some of the boys on the rugby team.

So why does the idea feel exciting?

*

By the time I arrive at school, I've stowed the lipstick away in my inside blazer pocket and dried my eyes, though they're probably still slightly red from the rubbing. Even if I had a mirror I wouldn't check, though—that would mean copping a look at my ugly mug.

I find myself walking down the footpath almost alongside Jessie Porter. She's in my class for most subjects, the kind of girl who like most of my peers is polite when she has to talk to me—when a teacher puts us on a project together, for instance—but rarely spends time with me. Possibly because I go red-faced and jumpy every time a girl tries talking socially to me. I like Jessie. Often I fantasise about the girls I might date, if I ever figure out how to be a man properly and also wrap my head around just how dating works, and Jessie is one of those I think I'd quite like to go out with. Over the summer, she's dyed her hair; it's naturally a brown so dark it looks black in most lights, but today it's a pleasant shade of blonde. I look at it, falling down Jessie's back, and get lost in a daydream. Imagining touching it. Imagining if I was a girl, and my own hair was that long.

She snaps me out of my reverie. "You alright, Harry?"

I realise I was staring. "Yes," I babble, blushing. "I'm fine."

Jessie frowns. "You don't look fine. Have you been crying?"

"NO," I shout—too loud, too quick.

"It's okay if you have," Jessie says. "There's no shame in letting it all out sometimes."

"I haven't been crying," I tell her.

"Okay," she says. "Well, I guess I'll see you in class later. Unless you want to sit with me and the girls at lunch? We don't bite."

"See you later." I watch her as she goes. It strikes me just how unfair the school uniform is. Why do we boys have to wear horrible shirts and ties and tight trousers? The girls get to wear cotton polo shirts and black skirts, and lots of them have lighter, more gentle shoes than the horrible options the boys get. Jessie's wearing flat black shoes with a rounded toe and a little plastic bow on the front. I'd love to wear shoes like that—without the bow, of course. To be honest, I'd probably even wear shoes with a bow on the front, if that wasn't such a feminine detail.

*

The first day of term is always a piece of piss. Half of the day is dedicated to form time; we'll essentially sit until lunch in our form rooms, looking over our new timetables and listening to boring announcements. And then after lunch there's only one lesson—English, in my case. I can already tell what we're going to do in English. Miss Jorgensen will run us through the schedule for the year and hand out copies of the first book we have to read this year, and then we'll "read" (or, more accurately: talk quietly amongst ourselves until the bell rings for the end of the day). And that's it.

I actually have a friend in my form. Tom. One of only two real friends I've ever had, the other being my mate from primary school. I think I'm only friends with Tom because we've spent the last four years sitting next to each other throughout every form period, and that sort of regular proximity forces you to interact to a certain degree. And we actually have some nerdy interests in common, principally a love of Star Wars, that don't require me to indulge in some fake masculinity just to find common ground. Tom spends most of the morning quietly cracking jokes about the announcements my form tutor Mrs Calne reads out. To a one, the jokes are trite; a fair few are slightly misogynistic, and if I was a girl I'd be offended by them. In fact, I'm a bit offended by them anyway, and I'm not a girl.

"So, how did you spend your summer?" Mrs Calne's finished the announcements, so Tom's run out of fuel for his jokes. "I didn't see you out at all."

"I didn't go out," I tell him. I never do in the summer. I'm a hermit. When it's that hot, you've kind of got to go shirtless if you're doing any physical activity—such as playing with your friends—and I've always hated being shirtless. It feels like I'm naked, you know? Like I'm showing off a part of my body that isn't meant to be shown.

"You should," said Tom. "You should come and play footy with me and the lads."

"Maybe next time," I say. We've had this chat on the first day of Year Eight, Year Nine, Year Ten and now Year Eleven. Every time I promise to stop being a hermit and join him for football. I never follow up. It's not even that I don't enjoy football—as sports go, it's not that bad actually. I just prefer to play by myself. I've found other boys tend to kick the ball really hard, and I'm worried I'll get hurt if a stray shot hits me.

Tom leans in close and speaks barely above a whisper. "We're in Year Eleven now," he says. "So it's time for us both to do what we said we'd do back in Year Seven. As of this year, I'm saying goodbye to lunchtimes in the library. This is the year Tom Hampson gets himself a girlfriend. And you do your thing, too, Harry."

I can't remember what I said I'd do. I nod along, deciding that Tom probably doesn't remember either, so he won't notice if I don't do it. Or maybe I said I'd get an A in Maths or something—that does sound like the sort of thing I'd have said, and with a bit of swotting I can probably pull it off. Especially if Tom's not going to be in the library with me every lunchtime.

Strangely, despite him having literally just said he's going to be elsewhere at lunch, I don't internalise the fact until I get to the library and Tom's not there. I sigh. Sit down at a table, resigned to a lonely lunch break. And then I remember Jessie's offer. I don't know how serious it was—there's a good chance she just invited me to hang with her friends out of politeness, knowing I'd never actually do it—but it's not like I can get any lonelier, can I? I'm already looking at a year spent sitting by myself every lunch. So, immediately after sitting down, I hoist myself back up and leave the library.

I don't actually know where I'm going. I've spent every lunch break since Year Seven in the library, and I have no idea where anybody else hangs out. Worse, I don't want to look like the awkward loner who stares at everyone, so instead I become the awkward loner who stares at his own feet, glancing around every now and then to see if I can see Jessie. This is probably how I come to manage three full circuits of the school grounds without finding her. I'm on my fourth go-round when I hear her voice.

"Harry! We're over here."

I turn, and there she is, sat at one of the many picnic benches strewn around the quad, a beaming smile on her face. There are three others with her, looking various degrees of enthusiastic at the thought of sharing their lunch break with a boy. I feel my face redden as I walk towards them.

"Sit down," Jessie says. "We saved you a seat."

"Honestly, Jess, I figured he wouldn't show up," says one of her friends, a girl with a pink face and red hair. Emma, if I remember right. "I've never seen him talking to anyone."

"I haven't really ever talked to anyone," I say. "Nobody's ever invited me to sit with them before."

One of the girls awws and Jessie says "that's so sad". I park myself in the empty seat and set about unpacking my lunch. Jessie stands. "So, Harry," she says. "This is Emma." She points out Emma, whose name I had remembered right, and then a tall girl whose hair is in thick black braids. "And this is Kiah." And then to the last girl, waifish, with brown hair to her shoulders. "And Olivia."

Olivia looks familiar. "Holy shit," I blurt, "you look just like my friend Oliver." And then I regret it. Saying a girl looks like a boy is probably incredibly insulting. Olivia's gone pale and bowed her head, and the other girls have all gone way too silent. Not an absence of sound so much as a conscious effort to pull all the sound away.

I've fucked it.

Well done, Harry. A chance to make actual friends, and you've messed up. You really are pathetic.

But then they start talking again, muttering. Olivia lifts her head with a put-on smile. "That's because I am Oliver," she says. "Or rather, I was."